Privacy

Your username is your identity

Everywhere on Starbook you appear as your username. Nothing else about you is shown unless you put it in your profile: a display name, a bio, a place, a website. Your email address is never shown to other members.

What we store

Your account: username, email address, and your password as a salted scrypt hash (we never store or see the password itself). Whether your email is confirmed, your settings, and the apps you have connected.

What you upload: your pictures and any data files, the facts you enter about each session (telescope, camera, filters, exposures, dates, site, sky darkness) and how you processed it. A FITS header you upload is kept with the photo, because it is where those facts come from.

What you do on the site: likes, saves, ratings, comments, follows, messages, reports and downloads, so the site works and so rankings can be counted. Ratings count anonymously: nobody else sees who gave what.

Server logs: the address your requests come from, your browser's name and the pages requested, kept for running and protecting the site. Your signed-in sessions record the browser and address they started from.

Coordinates are rounded

Smart telescopes record where you imaged to a few metres, which is usually your home. We store what your file says, but public pages show site coordinates rounded to 0.1° (about 10 km) by default.

You can choose exact (for a public dark-sky site you want to share) or hidden (only the place name you type), in Settings or per photo. Astro Sidekick rounds before it sends unless you turn that off.

Who helps us run it

Railway hosts the site and its database. Backblaze B2 stores the files. bunny.net delivers original files and data downloads through short-lived links, and Cloudflare delivers the resized pictures everyone browses. Resend sends our emails (confirmation, password reset, and the digests you choose).

Each of them handles your data only to provide that service to us. We do not sell your data, show advertising or use third-party trackers.

If you sign in with Google, Google shares only your email address and an account id with Starbook; we never receive your name or picture. We keep the id and the address with your account so the next sign-in finds it, and you can disconnect it in Settings → Account.

Four cookies

We set one essential cookie to keep you signed in, one that remembers the theme you chose, one that is set only while you sign in with an emailed code, and one that is set only for a moment while you sign in with Google. Nothing for advertising or analytics. The cookie page has the details.

Messages

Messages are private between the people in a conversation. If someone reports a message, a moderator reads that message to decide what to do; otherwise nobody at Starbook reads them.

Deleting your account

Settings → Account → Delete my account. You confirm with your password (or, if your account has none, by typing your username), and then, at once: your photos are unpublished and their files deleted from storage, your sessions and connected apps are signed out, and your account row is deleted together with your profile, likes, saves, ratings, follows, messages and notifications.

Your comments stay in their threads, so conversations still read, but they are shown as written by "deleted user" with nothing linking them to you.

There is no grace period and no undo; we have not built one. Copies can linger in our backups (database point-in-time recovery, and 30 days of versions in the files bucket) until they age out.

Deleting your data

To have your data deleted without signing in, or to ask for what Starbook holds about you to be removed, see Data deletion.

Questions

Write to legal@starbook.si with any question about your data, or to ask for a copy of it.